US Central Command Wants Counter-Terrorism Finance Analyst with Second Life & Bitcoin Experience to Deploy in Afghanistan

If you're knowledgeable in virtual worlds and currency, here's a great and rewarding job with a top US corporation: Counter Threat-Finance Analyst. You'll mostly work in sunny Florida, and since it's typically a 40 hour work week, you'll have lots of time for outdoor fun. One possible drawback: On occasion, you also need to work in Afghanistan. That's because the company is Lockheed Martin, one of the country's top defense contractors, and its client is United States Central Command, where US military operations in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia (especially Afghanistan) are controlled. The analyst will be tracking "Counter-Narco-Terror illicit finance", which means the applicant should know about Sharia-compliant banking and terrorist finance, along with knowledge of "emerging alternative and mobile payment methods", especially Bitcoin and Second Life, which both enable the (relatively anonymous) conversion of real money into virtual currency, and vice versa. (And notably, there seems to be a lot of trade between Bitcoin and SL's Linden Lab currency.)

The possibility that Al Qaeda and insurgent affiliates like the Taliban might use Second Life for money laundering has been discussed before. Indeed, a few years ago, an Al Qaeda expert told me some Al Qaeda-affiliated extremists were using Second Life for training purposes. To me, what's notable about this job is that it's specifically mentioning Afghanistan, which makes me wonder if CENTCOM has reason to believe the Taliban are using Second Life and Bitcoin for those purposes.

That might seem unbelievable, but reportedly, the Taliban are creating fake Facebook accounts featuring hot babe profiles, in an attempt to friend and spy on US military personnel stationed in Afghanistan.

Hat tip: Redditor "Spitteler".

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Comments

[Moni Duettmann]

Bringing the Bushist terror paranoia into Second Life? I'm out here...

[Iggy]

First, a serious note: 84 hour weeks do not a "sharp edge" make for a warrior. DoD needs to hire two people if they are serious about this threat.

Second, the fun bit: I am hopeful that Al Qaeda does use SL for training. Imagine them then, in a RL firefight:

Hakim: "Abdullah, wait for me to cross the sim-border from Pakistan!"

Abdullah: "I am waiting. But Hakim, my AK is jammed!"

Hakim: "No, Abdullah, it's fine. Just wait for the FPS rate to catch up...as we did in SL when we raided that haven of Western debauchery and infidel decline, Bukkake Bliss."

Adbullah: "Of course! How we showed them the flames of Jahanam that day! Say, what is that sound?"

NATO: "KA-BOOM." (making martyrs at 2000 yards, as some snipers say on their T-shirts)

[Dave Bell]

Bitcoin, maybe.

But way back, when I started in SL, I was told that every L$ had a unique serial number, and could be tracked by LL. I'm told that the L$ that I buy for my account cannot be turned back into real-world currency by me, which suggests that they can do that sort of tracking.

And the number of L$ that would have to flow for a useful transaction, well, it feels wrong. How do you mask moving a few hundred USD? Unless there's a fake Land Baron?

I suspect the training would be a group of people getting together and using voice. I don't think the 3D environment is all that useful.

If anyone wanted to do something like that, it might be better to download simonastick and force the CT types to look for SL-style traffic on the wider internet.

[shockwave yareach]

Uh huh. Right. Terrorists in VR. Sure. Why, just the other day I saw an advert selling an AK47 dedicated to holy war -- it shoots uncircumsized brown penises at the infidels...

If the fanatics murder a US ambassador just because someone somewhere used a camcorder and said the muslim invisible man in the clouds was a doodyhead, I can't imagine them being able to tolerate Second Life. After all, the women talk back to you and you can't really kill them for doing so.

[shockwave yareach]

Dave -- they keep a transactional list of L$ purchase and sales. Any company that works with credit cards does that. They also have a list of every transaction you make with L, simply for their own records; you can look that up in the SL website yourself.

This is because years ago, a griefing technique developed where griefers would use stolen credit cards and buy lots of L with it, then do lots of business with the person they didn't like. When the card came up stolen, LL would suspend everyone the griefer had bought from while the investigation was underway. So some people lost land and businesses while LL looked into it to figure out who was an alt and was simply cashing out huge numbers of L after getting them from another alt using a stolen credit card.

Yes, things can be chased down. But not every L -- basically LL treats anyone paid after a stolen credit card is used as a potential alt of the thief.

[Ajax Manatiso]

I KNEW those furries looked suspicious!!!